Supporting the growth of the biggest European platform dedicated to electromobility with Scalingo

Who are you? Where do you come from?

My name is Hakan Ebabil, I’m the CTO at
Chargemap a company I’ve started with
my co-founder Yoann Nussbaumer in 2015. We’ve been knowing each other for nearly 15 years.
Yoann was my first boss at his previous company (Skalpel). After that experience I worked for a consulting company, then an ecommerce website. I
eventually worked as a freelance for a while. This is when I’ve reconnected with
Yoann and I decided to get involved in the Chargemap project.

What is Chargemap doing?

First of all, Chargemap is a community database gathering charging stations for
electric vehicles (EV). The idea of the service sprouted in 2001 with the wave of
“new” electric vehicle models. At the time, there wasn’t any common repository to
help EV drivers going from one point to another. The autonomy of those vehicles was
rather limited and it was a real pain for drivers that wanted to buy an electric
vehicle.

Our application are here to help the community of EV drivers. They can search,
add or modify pieces of information about charging stations, add photos, comments, share
their experience at the station, etc. Ultimately, our app allows EV drivers to be
more confident about their travel, especially when they are far from home. Today, this
community gathers 260,000 members and grows with 10,000 new
members per month. That means 1 European EV driver (our main market) out of 4
uses Chargemap!

For 2 years now, Chargemap has started a new business: EV drivers are now allowed
to charge on any public stations network with one unique badge, the
Chargemap Pass. It’s an RFID badge, compatible with many charging
networks accross Europe. We deal with roaming and billing with all those
entities so that our users can free their mind. We also propose this solution as a
white label with automakers like Jaguar.

How do you use Scalingo?

The technical infrastructure of Chargemap has changed a lot in the past 7-8
years. Because our business has also changed a lot and we had to adapt and create new
softwares continuously. But also because our tech team has grown and matured. That’s why our
expectations towards our providers has changed over time as well.

The only constant is that all our providers have always been located in France.

Before we discovered Scalingo, we experimented with several flavor of hosting.
We first moved from a classic hosting (dedicated servers), with a third-party contractor
handling the system administration, to a private
cloud platform (vSphere) and back to our initial choice but with another
contractor. But in the end, no solution did really suit us. There was always a
pain point: either the provider did not satisfy us fully, or the monitoring
was not pro-active, either there were too many administration or security tasks on our shoulders, or
we simply had too many failures… In short, it means that we spent a lof of
time dealing with problems that shouldn’t be our problems. We couldn’t
focus on the essentials: create business value by writing software.

About two years ago, we’ve started a profound change of software architecture. We
decided to move from a monolithic system to a galaxy of microservices.
During the process, we designed our applications to be more cloud ready and less
“provider dependant”.

We did not want to spend hours configuring servers anymore. We did not want to
manage security updates by ourselves. We did not want to wait several hours /
days before a simple nginx update. We wanted to be free to migrate quickly from one
supplier to another if needed. In short, we wanted flexibility, scalability,
performance, stability, and most importantly: we wanted to be able to focus on
our real job.

Scalingo was the ideal partner to help us in this change process. From the
beginning we were seduced by the speed with which we have been deploying new versions
and new applications. The configuration of the application is very simple,
straight to the point. We mainly use PHP and adding a few more lines to the
compose.json file to configure our deployment, helps us getting to production faster. We do not have to wait
for support tickets to be resolved, hours or days after being created. We are
free to decide and test different configurations by ourselves. And that’s
priceless.

The tech team at Chargemap is composed of 2 teams of 4 to 5 people. Scalingo’s
Dashboard helps us share information between collaborators with a UI that goes
straight to the point. Especially since that I know the UI/UX will go in a
direction that totally suits me, to better control your projects, collaborators
and applications when you have a lot to manage. The dashboard allows each team
member to get the same monitoring informations which was very difficult with our
former providers.

The notifications system is another thing that helps us in our daily life. The
Slack integration is really easy to setup (it’s a matter of 3 clicks). It’s this
kind of real time communications that helps us be more reactive when bad things
happen to our apps and spread vital information among the tech team and the
people at Chargemap as a whole. We found that it’s the perfect companion to
Pingdom.

Finally, in the rare cases where we couldn’t find a solution by ourselves to our
technical need, the availability, the professionalism and the highly technical
knowledge of Scalingo’s support team is the icing on the cake. Being able to
get support with a simple chat message and get answers within minutes makes a
big difference in our business where each minute is important, especially
during crisis.

We can
concentrate on what we should do best: satisfying Chargemap's users.

Hakan Ebabil, CTO at
Chargemap

Going with Scalingo is a strategic choice which lets us concentrate on what we
should do best: satisfying Chargemap’s users.

Today, we have sliced our monolithic legacy app into microservices that have been
migrated to Scalingo. Critical business functions are now hosted on Scalingo:
interoperability services, billing and the community management platform. Others
will follow.

Using
Scalingo makes it hard and painful to go back to a more traditional hosting
service.